Thursday, April 22, 2010

Paul Croker is a versatile artist, reflected by his various musical influences from past to present.His love affair with the vinyl format started at the age of 4, when he was given his first 7″ single, and would grow throughout the next few decades throughout the Hip Hop, Trip Hop and Big Beat movements.During the early years, he ruined a few parentally-owned record players teaching himself to scratch and mix records. From the age of 14 he learnt the guitar, joining like minded friends from school, playing in Zeppelin/Hendrix/Floyd influenced bands, gigging all over the country at pubs, clubs and festivals. Finding particular resonance with Eastern influenced sounds, he experimented with alternate tunings and backwards phrasing, forming the core of his sound. In the 90’s after becoming immersed in the Big Beat scene in London and Brighton, Paul began to experiment with creating Digital based music, finding an affiliation with the use of samples and loops to build soundscapes. DJ’ing in local clubs, he learnt to beat mix and also layer sounds within a live environment.His first release, ‘Beats for the Subverted’ is primarily influenced by early DJ Shadow, Portishead and UNKLE. The simple aim was to set about recording a vinyl-only sample based work, overdubbing bass and percussion where necessary. The result is a dark, ambient hip hop flavoured album, with a light social commentary.Following the coherency that we have always sustained at the Lab, PS012 is not what you would call our typical ambient/noise release. In the same way that Paul approached us with his fabulous work, and surprised us with his sound, talent and concepts we hope that you will also feel what we felt, the many times we have already heard these tracks. For those that still need a “logic” explanation the answer is very simple: We love it! And that has always been the reason behind every release we have made so far and will continue to be for many more to come.Paul would like to thank to:My wonderful understanding family & friends, all at PublicSpaces Lab, my Twitter family, and Ableton & Technics..